Big Bang Ricochet - WW2 Collection: Indian Pattern Carriers

What the Hell is an Indian Pattern Carrier? I Never Saw That in Any History Book.

It is no surprise that you haven't seen it in any history books. The Indian Pattern Carriers are simply a horribly unappreciated vehicle of the war. I've been through all the same books you have and quite a few more and until now, the Indian Pattern Carrier seems to have been mentioned in only a half dozen or so books, and in most of those, it was simply mentioned in passing. To make matters worse, several of those references confuse later versions of the carrier with entirely different vehicles. What makes this particularly astonishing is the fact that during World War II, the Indian Pattern Carriers were utilized as propaganda tools. In the U.S., they were used to promote the Lend-Lease program, in Canada, they were referenced in the manual of the truck they were based upon, and elsewhere in the British Empire, they made it into newsreels, where they were popularized as a highly effective vehicle of the Long Range Desert Groups, with the media nicknaming them "The E-Boats of the Desert," referring to Nazi Germany's effective PT-type coastal war boats.

Anyway, the Indian Pattern Carrier was a means of equipping the massive Indian Army with a cheaper, simpler vehicle that could be made in India, rather than relying on efforts to supply India with vehicles made in Britain or Canada, in effect providing them with their own equivalent of the Universal Carrier. It and many other wartime vehicles also demonstrated of how heavily exploited and oppressed the British colonies were, considering indigenous industry in NZ, Australia and India were incapable of mass producing many of the major components of military vehicles they attempted to build.

Along with the 10 page entry for the Indian Pattern Carrier, this book provides 13 pages of coverage for the Bren Light Machine Gun and three pages on the Boys Anti-Tank Rifle, the only two weapons officially deployed on the Indian Pattern Carriers.

It is all topped off by an appendix providing game material compatible with D20 Modern. Currently 31 pages in all, plus the cover. Please note that the appendices are provided as separate files.

Additional appendices with material compatible with Spycraft 2.0 and Savage Worlds will be released in the near future.

Unlike past issues of Big BangBig Bang Ricochet, the silver-covered books will provide everything necessary to allow you to drop the vehicle straight into your game. No more hunting for other issues covering weapon entries included in previous issues. please be aware this all-inclusive nature means that these silver edition booklets may occasionally duplicate material that has appeared in previous products.

4 May 2010: Initial release with D20 Modern appendix.

5 May 2010: Oops! Weapon real world data forms in the core booklet are an old format. Replaced with the new, expanded data forms.

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.